Towns tread lightly on social media platforms

Sunday

May 28, 2017 at 8:32 AM

By Jeff Blanchard

For the lion’s share of town halls around here, new-fangled gizmos like Twitter and Facebook remain something for others to dabble in. None of the towns are routinely using the tools so embraced by the nation’s president, such as Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat, or any of the other platforms that enable instant communications these days.

“Being older,” said Charlie Sumner, who retired in 2016 after 30 years as Brewster’s top administrator, “I just haven’t gone on Facebook myself, personally, because it just isn’t part of my universe. But as a town administrator, setting up and maintaining a Facebook page was just one more thing, and one more thing too many. I always wanted to do a blog, but I never had time for that either. The job was just too overwhelming.”

While towns have had their own websites, online tax assessment databases, email-blast capabilities and information technology officials for years, so far it's largely the police and fire departments that see the advantages of communicating immediately with the public without the filter of traditional news organizations. They are active on Facebook and have policies governing the use of social media.

Ups and downs

“We were relatively new to Facebook at the time,” said Brewster Police Capt. Heath J. Eldredge, recalling the 2015 arrest of a man who robbed Brewster Farms, a gas station and convenience store.

“And we put out a photo from the surveillance tapes they had, and within hours three people came into the station and gave us the name of the suspect -- three unrelated people at three different times all gave us the same name, so that helped out a lot.”

Eldredge has clearly embraced the upside to social media, and not only for solving cases, but issuing traffic alerts regarding the town’s ongoing road construction, announcements relating to weather, to missing persons, to escaped animals such as the pig that got away last month.

“It isn’t much different with us than everyone else; postings about kids and animals get the most attention, he said, adding, “With social media we control the information.”

Not always. There was the case in Yarmouth, which was routinely posting mug shots of the recently arrested. A local news site began picking them up and running them as a feature to which readers were allowed to make anonymous comments underneath the text. When a defense attorney showed the comments about the accused to a judge and jury, the police watched their case vanish thanks to the public, pre-trial tainting of his client.

He said four members of the Brewster department can utilize social media at work, including himself, an information technology staffer, an administrative assistant and a detective, and all members of the department are governed by a two-page Social Networking Policy that is designed to protect the department, the town and the public from harm; to maintain civility in public discourse, and to keep their social media landscape as free from inappropriate words and images as any other part of the police operation.

Over time, police and fire personnel have grown accustomed to the new deal, and learned to avoid posting pictures of themselves at ballgames and parties when they were supposed to be sick in bed, for example.

As far as policing social media, Eldredge said the town hasn’t had to get too involved beyond the occasional search for information that requires seeking records from Internet companies (not easy “when the company is based in Kabul”) and the occasional intervention.

“It’s really the anonymous comments that cause all the trouble, that and we get the occasional violation of a restraining order. Harassing someone you’re not supposed to be in contact with can happen on Facebook just as easily as the phone.”

Eldredge, who is 38, has a young person’s familiarity with social media that makes him especially comfortable using it and talking about it. He said he posts to Facebook then cross-posts to Twitter and Instagram, and leaves the other platforms for another day.

“In some ways it’s like email in the mid-90s,” he said. “You start out thinking I really don’t need it, but at some point the tide of public opinion grows to the point where it just makes sense.

As in Brewster, Orleans fire and police also post on Facebook, and also have policies governing their behavior. For Fire Chief Tony Pike, this allows him to announce a water main break on the official site and to share pictures of his bulldog on his personal page; never the twain meet except that both manage to convey a feeling of comity and community.

It only follows that as more and more public officials share their work on social media, some have attained recognition well beyond their borders -- Bangor, Maine, for example.

Captain Eldredge beamed at the mention, and without prompting said, “Some take a more humorous angle. We try to maintain a good balance.”

In Bangor, the police department has attracted a global following for its Facebook postings, including one recent story that discussed the legality of a local woman’s business model: topless house-cleaning.

Nothing wrong with it on its face, said the Bangor PD, but still they had to arrest the woman for shoplifting lingerie.